Finding you need to send top-secret email communication with KMail, but you don't know where to start? An article in Linux Journal (part of Marcel Gagné's "Cooking with Linux" series) shows you how to use the Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG) in conjunction with KGpg to secure your email. Learn how to generate and import keys, sign and encrypt email, and otherwise keep your private communication away from prying eyes.

Comments

I have my inbox set to forward things from comcast to a larger mailbox as an archive. I want my sent messages to be forwarded as well and sent to my inbox. In Mozilla this is easy to setup, but in Kmail I can't find a way to do this in a simple way.

This is something I use foten in Mozilla Mail and I haven't found a way to do this in Kmail. Any tips?

Anyway, Kmail is great and I still switched to it because I like it's integration and speed. Though secret messages are an added benefit! ;)

i'm using kmail with my local imap server. As i want to keep track of my sent emails, i store them in my imap mailbox. I've created a folder 'SENT' in my imap account, where i want to store them. In kmail's preferences -> identities on the extended tab (second tab on my kde 3.2.1 installation) you can set the folder for sent messages. If you have more than one outgoing email server, you only have to create an identity for each server and set the right outgoing mail server (needs to be configured before) on the same tab as above. This way, you can store mails to different mail servers in different folders.

What I would really like to see in KMail is support for PKCS#11 security tokens. Mozilla has it (Privacy & Security -> Certificates -> Manage security devices...) so I'm able to use my keypair residing in employer's security smartcard with Mozilla and don't have to mess around with generating new keypair and trustability of it.

Heck yeah! This is my #1 complaint about KMail. I've tried following the HOWTO for using openssl/certificate with signed/encrypted emails, but it is (1) overly complicated and (2) very flaky, when it works at all.

While working with business partners and exchanging encrypted mail with kmail, I have discovered that actually very few pgp programs support pgp/mime (the way to send encrypted attachment directly with your mail).

So, I had to encrypt manually the document to all the person I want to send it to, and then attach the right encrypted document to the mail and send it. Very tedious. ThunderBird allows me to send encrypted documents using either pgp/mime or by encrypting them separately for each recipient. Because of this, I now use thunderbird to send encrypted emails!

The errors reported by kmail are also quite poor. One of my partner uses IDEA which is not in gpg. All kmail could tell me is that I entered a wrong passphrase although I just opened the mail.

I think there is still a lot of work to make kmail work seemlessly with encrypted stuff.

Well, GPG seems to work, but how about S/MIME? The support has been announced
a while ago. However, I don't think it's possible to configure. I wish somebody figured it out and wrote an article in English...